I’m a big fan of epigraphs, so much so that I even sometimes put them on blog posts, which is a bit like putting a plaque on a sand castle. So I am heartened to discover that a number of this spring’s new releases come with great epigraphs, which are far easier blogged about than the books themselves. I include the following selection of my four favorites as a sort of backhanded list of recommended reading if you have found your nightstand recently bare.
4. David Shields fascinating defense of the lyric essay, Reality Hunger, a book that is itself written as a list of aphorisms, gets introduced with a bit of wisdom from Graham Greene. “When we are not sure, we are alive.”
3. Michael Lewis in his new romp through the absurdity of Wall Street, The Big Short, begins with Leo Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing can not be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.”
2. Christopher Hitchens has a memoir coming out in June, Hitch-22, which begins with a great bit from W. H. Auden’s “Death’s Echo.”
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.
Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
1. The best epigraph I have yet discovered this year comes from Simon Johnson and James Kwak, who have found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby a perfect introduction to 13 Bankers, their book on the financial crisis and its aftermath.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Indeed.